by Tassia Mila

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1. The concept of Overflowing lines came to me in 2010, during a storm that caused several people to camp together under a large blue canvas tent. There was little space between one person and another in this camp, which I called: war-peace — a moving space-time.

2. Because the land of the blue tent, which sheltered everyone, was quite steep, some people who took care of the tent began to dig cracks in the ground, creating channels through which rainwater could flow, like creating ways to the water pass, and by doing that, it wouldn't overflow into the big tent.

3. That's when occurred to me to think of overflowing lines.

4. I thought that an overflowing needs lines that give it a passage through.

5. I thought about nature, wild nature.

6. In the wild nature, overflowing lines can be thought as the happening of a river.

7. Rivers are the lines that generate and cut a territory and allow the overflow to happen. Thus, paths are created and opened. Rivers are actively connected to the everyday life, providing water for the most of vital needs.

8. Rivers flow into seas and oceans.

9. Rivers are power lines of nature and what I think of as Overflowing lines.

10. Rivers flow into waterfalls.

11. The waterfalls.

12. Waterfalls are like the intimate meeting point of a river with rocks, caves and mysteries. The depths.

13. In a waterfall, there is an energy peak, generated by the movement of the waterfall, capable of activating creative senses.

14. Nature is art.

15. Art is a passage trough to overflowing lines.

16. Art is how as humans we can activate ways to what overflows ourselves, making sense of them.

17. The Human being.

18. The human being is nature.

19. And by being nature, the human being can activate devenirs. Devenir as in becoming something of somewhat at the same time of being as well a human. The body is a crossroads that can receive multiple “becomings” or “devenirs”. Jaguar-devenir, stone-devenir, river-devenir, salamander-devenir; If a salamander could sing, how would it sing? I imagine a salamander singing and i sing as if I am a salamander.

20. With devenir and imaginations, we can consider what the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa calls holding up the sky, to prevent a cosmic disarticulation and avoid the end of the world.

21. Activating nature-devenirs are ways of holding up the sky. An owl watches the night in the forest and says something in the air. And I use the verb say for the sound of the owl, because it is also human in the indigenous cosmoview. From this perspective, humans, animals, plants, minerals, water, etc., are all able of crossing borders and being human too, just as humans cross borders and devenirs.

22. And here we also can talk about becoming human, the human-devenir. Let us not take for granted that being human is only linked to having been born in a body called human. There is also a becoming-human, a human-devenir that can be accessed and activated, both for those who are born with the human body, the human totem, and for various beings in other totems and bodies. The human is a circulating potentiality in becoming, just like animalities, and there is no hierarchy as if the human were superior to the animal, but rather a matter of balancing instances and totems in a relationship with nature.

23. The devenir is not about reaching a final state but about being in fluxus.

24. Fluxus that ultimately compose a Corporeal-sonica —a body sonicscapes — the sounds that a body can modulate and reverberate in relation to other bodies and devenirs: human, animal, plant, machine, instrument, object, land, territory, etc.

25. Sound has the ability to infiltrate the cracks of time, activating forgotten memories and gestures, while images operate as contact surfaces, where traces of devenirs are inscribed. Sounds and images open fissures and hold the marks of these openings.

26. The Corporeal-sonica emerges as a constantly transforming landscape, where bodies and sounds traverse and modulate one another. If each body carries within it a resonance, a latent sonic-imagetic archive, then it is possible to think of sound as a gesture of simultaneous listening and inscription.

27. Overflowing Lines, in this sense, are trajectories of flow but also sensitive marks in the fabric of time and space. Like a river that, upon overflowing, redraws its own banks, bodies resonating in their sonic landscapes create new territories and new ways of being in the world.

28. Just as a singing body can become a river, a stone, a salamander, an image in fluxus can become pure pulsation, pure overflow. In this intersection, sound and image are not fixed categories but states of vibration that activate the sensitive and at times blur the lines of overflow into an overflowing of lines, which will then call for new contours, in a movement of temperance. Temperance, Arcana 14 of the Tarot, depicts an angel holding two vessels, pouring water from one to the other in a continuous motion, much like Overflowing Lines, their contours, their blurred margins only to be redraw again.

29. And what if we think of this dynamic not just as a juxtaposition of elements but as a field of forces? Sounds and images do not merely coexist; they affect each other, create tensions, dissolve into one another—a sound, after all, is an image, a sonic image. An image is not merely what is visible. The Corporeal-sonica expands into a larger field: an overflowing audiovisual landscape, where time and space twist, fold, and reinvent themselves.

30. Overflowing is not excess but the very nature of the unconscious—that great sea. In overflow, what the unconscious makes emerge comes forth, in a movement of encounter and shock. An electric field where the past, present, and future touch in a potent actuality. In what Walter Benjamin called Jetztzeit—the time of the now—not a linear presentification, but a now charged with this potent actuality, where times meet, generating a lightning flash—the moment of irruption when history ceases to be seen as a linear sequence and transforms into a constellation. At this moment, images freeze, they are dialectical, and like frames of a film, they become available for varied montages.

31. Corporeal-sonica is thus the stories we can generate, create, and tell, that move through our bodies, our territories of creation and existence.

32. If images hold traces, they also survive, returning in new contexts, reactivated by new sonic landscapes and resonant bodies. Aby Warburg developed the concept of Nachleben der Bilder—the survival of images—a concept he coined from the English 'survival of the images'. Warburg thought about the transit of images through space-time, how they move, susceptible to unconscious repetitions—Pathosformel—images, and I add, sounds as well, that emerge beyond the canonical tradition and that survive, persist, appear, and reappear through the cracks as suspended gestures that can be revealed, brought to light.

33. Just as sound waves propagate through space, crossing times and territories, images and sounds carry with them the memory of other gestures, other intensities. The survival of images is not a return to the past but a movement of overflow between past, present, and the future.

34. We can think of Corporeal-sonica as that electric field where, when a body sings or resonates, it becomes a transmitter of these survivals—a channel or even a device with multiple channels of transmission and reconfiguration of images and the affects that accompany them.

35. What Warburg called Pathosformeln, those formulas of emotion and intensity that traverse space-time, find a mode of activation through the frequency of a body in devenir.

36. The overflowing audiovisual landscape is a space of creation and a field of memory in motion. The sounds and images that pass through us are not isolated in time; they carry traces of other times, other chants, other overflows that resonate in the potent actuality of the present. Creating from this perspective means creating in flux, within a vibratory fabric of survivals, of suspended potentials waiting to be discovered, of possible and impossible novelties.